Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday November 28, 2004 @09:10PM
from the decorating-the-ecosystem dept.

Lisandro writes "As stated by Rasterman on his site, Enlightenment 0.17's window manager is now available on CVS, which means you can build e17 completely from it, as it is, and give it a try. Of course, it's still work in progress, and lacking in several areas, but it is usable, and looks as gorgeous as ever. Also, in related news, the XFCE team, one of the best 'light' desktop environments for *NIX, has released the first release candidate for XFCE 4.2, with a lot of long due improvements." About e17, Rasterman's note says "It's limited in its support for ICCCM, no NETWM support and it has no iconification, virtual desktops, shading, keybindings or button bindings, but it does WORK (just). it's also fast and beautiful."

We are dedicated to providing advanced graphical libraries, tools, and environments. Currently, the project is made up of three different components: Enlightenment DR16, The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, and Enlightenment DR17. While we are best known for the Enlightenment Window Manager itself there is a long history of providing advanced libraries and tools to support the window manager and other applications, such as Imlib, FNLib, and Imlib2, which extend far beyond the window manager itself in scope. Today, in development toward the DR17 Desktop Shell we have created an entirely new set of libraries and tools that provide more power and flexibility than any other group of graphical libraries available, which we refer to collectively as The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.

Enlightenment DR16

The Enlightenment DR16 window manager was released in 2000, along with its dependencies Imlib and Fnlib, and remains in heavy usage today. While rumors of its death still circulate, DR16.6 was release on Nov 2nd, 2003, and it remains in development today with a long life still ahead of it. DR16 has been the choice of power users and artists due to its low overhead, highly graphical, widely theme-able, extremely configurable, yet unobtrusive interface. Nearly all functions of the window manager can be handled without mouse input, including application launching via e16keyedit. It also remains highly portable, with ports avalible for Linux on all platforms, FreeBSD, IRIX, Solaris X86 and Sparc, HP-UX, AIX, OS/2, and more.

Imlib has lived a long life, still in heavy usage today, as one of the most popular image manipulation and rendering libs available. Its development was taken over by the GNOME project and used as GNOMEs rendering engine until it was replaced with GdkPixbuf in GNOME 2.0. It's popularity surpasses just development in C thanks to bindings for several scripting languages including PERL, Python, and Ruby.

Enlightenment Foundation Libraries

In developing DR17 it was made clear that we needed an entirely new set of libraries and tools. Raster had a bold vision of what was possible and where he wanted the next release to go, starting with Imlib2 and EVAS, and eventually growing into new libraries largely based on or around EVAS. It became clear that the usefulness of these libraries and tools went far beyond the DR17 release itself, just as Imlib did in DR16. Thus the collective library back-end of DR17 was given the independent title: the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, or EFL for short.

The EFL contains solutions for almost any graphical interface task, far beyond just rendering images. EVAS provides a highly optimized canvas library. Ecore provides a simple and modular abstraction interface and advanced event management including timers. Etox provides a complex text layout library complete with theme-able text stylization capabilities (previously Estyle). EDB provides a compact database format for intuitive and easy configuration management, including the storing of binaries. EET provides an integrated and flexible container that ends the traditions of providing themes in tarballs. Edje provides a revolutionary library and tool set for completely abstracting application interfaces from their code, including a complex and flexible method of designing interfaces. EWL provides a complete widget library built on all the other components of the EFL. And more!

Enlightenment DR17

Development Release 17 of the Enlightenment window manager represents an evolution into the next generation of desktop environments: the desktop shell. DR17 will provide integration between files and your environment in a seamless manner while encompassing a graphically rich and flexible architecture. It will not compete with GNOME or KDE, but be a completely new way of visualizing your desktop, based around the EFL which was built from the ground up for this task.

who's modding up the AC? come on people.
from the screenshot section of the E17 site:
"Both Virtual Desktops and Multiple Desktops are provided. Each is configured with its own settings dialog. You can even disable the desktop dragbar on the 'Special FX' dialog to get it out of your way complete."

Erm, I hope you're just saying that because you haven't heard anything in the last several years about the several rewrites and the refocusing of the enlightenment project on producing a set of extensive, massively featured libraries for application development with state of the art graphical capabilities and the ability to build complex applications using their components.

The window manager mentioned here is the very start of the "2 lines of code" (a long runnign in-joke) that builds a window manager out of these libraries. If you want a fully featured window manager, e16 is quite mature already.

Fluxbox really isn't a desktop. It's just a window manager. A pretty featureful window manager (which starts to blur the distinction), but a window manager none the less.

Fluxbox has a menu, minimal taskbar like support, tabbed windows, and a place for windowmaker dockapps.

Xfce is a complete and highly modular desktop environment. Unlike Gnome, components are loosely coupled, so you can easily run part of the environment without much overhead.

Xfce includes: A window manager, a taskbar program, a panel with plugins (launchers, menus, workplace switchers), a file manager, a desktop menu with a backdrop system, a session manager, a plugin capable settings manager, and a small application development environment.

There are some other micellaneous toys - calendar, a gtk theme engine, a nice resolution switcher, an iconbox. And the third party apps are growing - a couple of terminal programs, a fine media player, a growing number of panel plugins.

Making fluxbox and it's kin usable winds up requireing I run half a dozen other apps. Xfce is those apps, bundled together. You can think of it as Gnome done right.

Wow... mods are just as retarted as you are. Even the old version E16 had the features you are talking about, and it did them damn well also. I would say there are way more options to configure Enlightenment than any other desktop. With a little setup, you can make Enlightenment the best interface you have ever used.

things I would like to see1) reorginize the configuration menus(a little on the confusing side)2) have e16 keyconfig and menuconfig come built in

IMO enlightenment is sort of like debian, it goes a little slow, but damn when the thing finally comes out, it is impressive.

That is not true. It hasn't been for a while. While a restart *does* restart the cache, e16 has been able to reload the bg cache without a restart for a while now. (there's a menu option for it, and you can even do it from a shell with IPC)

Where do you see that on the site? That most likely needs to be changed.

Allow me to explain. They had started development a long while ago on E17 which they had put in CVS (this is what you are thinking of). Since then raster has decided to start over. They have been concentrating on the EFL(Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) since then. Today's "release" exciting beause this is our first look at the real E17

The E17 that was in CVS has been dead for a very long time. It was nothing more than a glorified test app while the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries were still in development. This is a brand new window manager and it was just committed to CVS earlier this week.

Now please don't go rushing to check it out yet. It is still barely functional and is not usable as a day-to-day wm yet - this is pre-alpha code essentially. We need more people who are interested in actually helping to contribute code than excited users especially at this stage.

Remember this is a complete rewrite. E16 can do all this, but IMO is getting too old, and slow. The Enlightenment team have been mainly working on all the building blocks at this stage, and not too much on the actual window manager.With componets like evas which now has a media player built into it is going to be the best window manager out there.If they have built it the way they were saying, it can be a fairly lean window manager if you build your theme correctly, without the builtin dvd player.;-)

There's a lot of stuff being said here about enlightenment, and people need to really understand was Raster is trying to do with E17.

First of all I use E16.7.1 as my WM of choice. I've been using E since I first found it several years ago.

A lot of people don't understand that, why would I use E when there's Gnome or KDE? Well, personally I can't understand why people use Gnome or KDE when there's E, but that's just personal preference.

I'm one of those people who like minimal functionality, uber-flexibility, combined with easy of use, and demands aesthetics above all. E is for me, but I can see why it's not for everyone.

People are scoffing at the poster who said E17 is beautiful and fast by suggesting that without functionality of course it's going to be fast.

Some people are laughing at Enlightenment for being around for 5 years and still not having virtual desktops, pagers, etc.

E16.7.1, the latest stable release, has everything you could ever want from a WM. It has THE greatest pager ever. It even updates the mini window images in real time! The virtual desktop support is second to none. You can even have different layers of virtual screen accessed by using the scroll wheel on the desktop.

E also has the best Xinerama support I've ever seen in a WM, for those of you who are into dual monitors like me.

Now let me address some of things people have been saying about E17. Apparently the poster forgot that this is slashdot and most of the posts will come from people who have never actually used Enlightenment, or who don't know anything about it.

Like many others have said, E17 is a complete re-write, and it's not anywhere near finished. The post is simply an acknowledgment that the window manager code for E17 has finally been put back into the CVS repo. So if you're wondering why it has such limited functionality, it's because it hasn't even been available to be worked on by anyone other than Raster yet!

Some people said that this is not news because it has always been in the repo. Not true. It was in the repo a while back before major rewrites to the foundation libraries, but it got taken out because the changes were too great. Raster had to start again on the WM code.

And finally... why should we care about E17? It is going to be cool... seriously cool. Raster and his team are excellent coders. The reason why it's taking so long is because they're doing it right this time.

The supporting libraries have an OpenGL rendering back-end. Think about that. A WM finally rendered in OpenGL. And think about the possibilities it will bring.

E17 will be worth waiting for. It will be feature-packed. It will be beautiful. And it will be fast.

For anyone wondering what Rasterman has been up to lately (aside from Enlightenment), I sat down with Rasterman last month and have posted my interview here [openasia.org]. Rasterman has some interesting thoughtson the Asian market, embedded platforms, and how they will interact with network middleware.

I had the same reaction when I started using it years ago. It took me days to finally read somewhere that the mouse is INTEGRAL to the functionality of e. In other words, in other desktops, lots of functions (if not all) are mapped to certain keys or hotkey combinations (which makes sense to me for efficiency) -- not to say that e doesn't have hotkeys. But in e, you have to throw that "conventional" wisdom out the door and re-adjust yourself in a new type of environment -- that is, one where the mouse is the center of all action (without a menubar).

That said, your mouse should be a three button mouse to best utilize e. And as another person posted, you can play around with it by right clicking the desktop, middle clicking, etc. to see all of the menus and functions.

I haven't kept up with DR17 development, but am I right to assume that the developers are trying to not only map mouse buttons, but also button and mouse movement combinations?

windows managers can be used as desktops but desktops (like KDE) somtimes use different windows managers.

Your very close. Obviously Fluxbox and KDE are desktops in the way most people think of them, drawing windows and providing a workspace, but what KDE is that Fluxbox is not is a Desktop environment.A window manager in their most basic form just draws windows on the screen, thats it. Thats not very usable since simply doing that does not give a method to actually run applications, so a menu is added. So thats all it does.Now look at everything KDE does and is. kwin draws windows, kdelibs provides IO slaves to handle background IO, kdenetwork provides access to protocols for every KDE app, and provides the kparts that come together for mail (kmail), news (knode), IM (kopete) and whatnot, all of which then also show up (along with others) in KDE's PIM, kontact. The khtml kpart is available to all apps, along with the file browser component, and so with those and the other kdenetwork kparts, konqueror becomes usable as a browser, file manager, ftp client, or whatnot depending on how its used. There are integrated apps for managing sound, X settings, your kernel config and virtual desktops, and that's just the beginning.

So often with a simple window manager you may have a bunch of apps that do many or all of these functions, but they are separate apps and if they all talk to each other, well your quite lucky. A full desktop environment has all the parts needed for a completely usable system to handle all those parts, and often more then you need, in a very integrated manner that all work together by design.

Enlightenment also has a file manager application called Evidence [sf.net]. Strong on metadata support, and with cool themes, evidence is specifically written to handle large or deeply nested directories. Have a look at the Pretty pictures [sourceforge.net].

1. the xserver was severely slowed down thanks to xvidcap hammering x to capture pixels (e17 was runing inside xnest which was running inside x, and xnest basicaly nukes extensions so all the speedups you get on a real x are gone and the extra indirections really hurt). 2 it's encoding a video realtime while e17 running and xvidcap is hammering x to grab pixels, 3. no it wont be faster not animating as the window pops up instantly and reacts instantly - you just get to see the animation. i like it and its insanely smooth "on a real display" the video is just an indication. get it, install it, run it yourself to see what i mean. the video does not do it justice. sure - you can remove the animation - no code changes needed. it's part of the theme. themes can animate and transition as they like. also the "it uses opengl" comments are wrong. it *CAN* use opengl *IF* it inits using opengl to render. we have a perfectly fast software rendering engine that beats the pants off most things around. all the exmaples you see all use the software renderer. no opengl or hardware help. in fact our preferred renderer is software. its 1. more reliable (stability) than opengl, 2. higher quality than opengl or xrender, and 3. in most usage scenarios much faster and smoother than opengl or xrender - even IF opengl is hardware accelerated (due to lock contention, DRI etc).